FIGHT OR FLIGHT – which is not called FLIGHT RISK, I keep getting those two titles mixed up in my head – has been advertised as “from the makers of JOHN WICK.” In this case it doesn’t mean the directors, the writer or 87Eleven, it means Basil Iwanyk’s company Thunder Road, who also backed 24 HOURS TO LIVE, SILENT NIGHT and TRIGGER WARNING. Specifically it’s part of their lower budget arm Asbury Park, who did BLACK SITE and RED RIGHT HAND.

Director James Madigan said in a Q&A that “Everybody wants to make ‘JOHN WICK on this’ and ‘JOHN WICK on a plane’ and ‘JOHN WICK goes to Bangkok,’ or whatever it is. You can’t make JOHN WICK unless you’re Chad, and you shouldn’t try.”

I have in fact seen this called “Josh Hartnett’s JOHN WICK,” which would be a completely unfair quality comparison, but I accept it in the spirit it was intended: to convey that it’s an absurd assassin-related action movie where Hartnett (HALLOWEEN H20) clearly did a bunch of training to pull off some good choreography. It’s sort of low rent and tonally messy but I like this type of movie and I like Hartnett so I had fun with it.

It begins in the familiar setting of a control room where various analysts watch fearfully on their screens as a raid to identify and capture an elusive terrorist called Ghost goes awry. Despite their failure they determine that Ghost is wounded and escaping on a flight to San Francisco, and their mean boss Katherine Brunt (Katee Sackhoff, RIDDICK) reluctantly calls the only person conveniently located to get on that flight and find out which passenger is bleeding.

That final option is of course Hartnett (OPPENHEIMER, WRATH OF MAN) as Lucas Reyes, a “roguishly handsome” drunk with bleach blond hair sleeping on the streets in Bangkok, trying to get breakfast at a bar when he gets the call. The unseemly name he has for Brunt in his contacts and the way he curses her out help us begin to understand that they used to date and also that she screwed him over professionally, leaving him in hiding after he (a Secret Service agent) tried to stop a billionaire he was protecting from beating up prostitutes.

So his background is kinda Joe Hallenbeck but his personality is more like something Keanu or Brad Pitt would play – not a cynical wiseass, more of a goofball. More surfer adjacent. Or maybe that’s just the Hawaiian shirt and the toad venom he accidentally gets high on during the climax. I know Harley did it first in THE SUICIDE SQUAD but I enjoyed the joke of him seeing beautiful psychedelia and not realizing it’s blood spraying out of a wound he created. As he loses more blood and consumes different chemicals throughout the movie he loses touch with reality, but in a fun way.

I’m getting too far ahead. The JOHN WICKian assassin part of the movie is that someone else found out Ghost was on the flight and put out a bounty, so many of the other passengers are actually trying to identify and kill Ghost, making Lucas’ task much harder. Basically, most of the people on the plane will have to kill each other.

I had heard that the great Marko Zaror (who I last saw in DIABLO) had another good weirdo villain role in this, and thankfully I was also warned that it was a pretty small part. He plays Cayenne, who’s sitting next to Lucas on the flight and starts talking to him about his dance moves. I believe it’s a pretty good crossover role for a martial artist because I have to imagine if he was new to me I’d be asking “Who is this guy?” just from the strange conversation, before he does some powerful kicks on Trip Fontaine from THE VIRGIN SUICIDES. The fight is limited even compared to his role in THE KILLER’S GAME (Lucas is no match for him and only defeats him Jar Jar style), but as always it’s a thrill to watch Zaror move and to dig into an eccentric character.

This is a luxury double decker jet and there is a surprisingly large bathroom for him to fight in, but he’s unable to hide a dead body and tells skeptical flight attendants Isha (Charithra Chandran, Bridgerton), and Royce (Danny Ashok, FOUR LIONS) that he’s working for the FBI to catch a terrorist. This way he’s able to get help finding Ghost and getting into parts of the jet, including when he has to find things in the luggage to use as weapons. (Thank you, whoever packed the chainsaw.)

TWIST SPOILERS THIS PARAGRAPH ONLY: Ghost ends up being who I figured it would be (seemingly delicate flight attendant Isha), she does fulfill my hope that she gets to do a little bit of fighting, and there’s also a not entirely unexpected reveal that she’s not the terrorist they describe her as but a righteous hacker using her skills to fuck over the people behind child slavery (of which she was a victim). For good reason evil tech companies are becoming a cliche bad guy in these movies, but I think this has some extra edge to the criticism in that they discuss our smart phones being made by children and (unless I misunderstood) there’s a great reveal that Brunt and her team are not actually CIA or a similar agency like I assumed – they’re doing wetwork for some stupid app company!

I didn’t catch that the character played by JuJu Chan Szeto (CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON: SWORD OF DESTINY, SAVAGE DOG, THE INVINCIBLE DRAGON, JIU JITSU, FISTFUL OF VENGEANCE) was called Master Lian, but I did notice that she was really cool. She wears a white gi and has two acolytes in yellow (stunt performers Claudia Heinz and Heather Choo) and they fight in conjunction as Ghost’s kung fu bodyguards.

FIGHT OR FLIGHT is directed by James Madigan (previously a visual effects producer and second unit director whose credits include digital film scanning operator on BLOODSPORT 2), written by Brooks McLaren (HOW IT ENDS) and D.J. Cotrona (the actor who played Flint in G.I. JOE: RETALIATION and Seth Gecko in the From Dusk Till Dawn TV series and was going to be Superman in George Miller’s Justice League movie). It actually made the 2020 Black List of best unproduced screenplays*.

I think the best movie to compare this to is probly BULLET TRAIN – another narrow-luxury-transportation-based quirky action comedy descendent of JOHN WICK. BULLET TRAIN is way slicker, way more expensive and ambitious, probly has more fights and a little more consistency with its comedic tone – there are a long list of legitimate reasons to consider it a better movie. But I think I liked this a little better because its jokes (although similarly corny) had a higher success rate for me, its lack of substance is more forgivable because it’s half an hour shorter, and as much as I liked Pitt playing that character there’s a more underdog quality to seeing a later Josh Hartnett vehicle. I guess TRAP is the better acting performance but there’s a similar appeal here in seeing this guy show off and have fun. He gets to veer between comedy, mega outbursts and well-executed fight scenes.

I noticed KICKBOXER VENGEANCE/RETALIATION star Alain Moussi as one of the fighters in the flash forward, then I never saw him again, so I thought maybe I imagined it until I saw on the credits that he was stunt coordinator. The fight coordinators are Brahim Chab (choreographer of MONKEY MAN) and Balazs Lengyel (THE KILLER’S GAME), and they have the advantage of working with d.p./camera operator Matt Flannery (MERANTAU, THE RAID, THE RAID 2, HAVOC), who knows how to get inside a nasty fight with the camera.

In the climax of the movie everything is out in the open and it just becomes a battle royale with creative uses of the confined space and the variety of weapons (such as a climbing ax). My favorite gag is when a guy is stuffed and closed inside the overhead luggage compartment, and then when Lucas opens it long enough for the guy to reach out and hit his opponent for him.

It gets a little gory at times, and has a pretty callous attitude toward death, or maybe not since it’s upsetting when some characters we like die. I felt it was over-serious in a few spots, just awkward in others, including the very end, but overall it’s a breezy hundred-ish minutes of laughs, tropes and beatings with a star stuck wearing someone else’s pajamas for most of the action. I recommend it. (Now on 4K, blu-ray, dvd and digital.)

*Other 2020 Black List scripts that I recognized by title: EMANCIPATION, THE GORGE, MAGAZINE DREAMS, MAY DECEMBER, NANNY, THE WOMAN IN THE YARD and whattayaknow, FLIGHT RISK.